New vanguard carries the beat for social change

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, March 7, 2002

This whole Bill Simon thing aside, one of the most surprising things about Tuesday's election is that it proved San Francisco's dance culture is emerging as a political force.

Dance culture? Political force?

Perhaps we should clarify. Dance culture doesn't refer to just any old GHB- abusing, cowboy-hat wearing, chest-hair-sporting hoochie papa who can manage to clutch a mini-bottle of Piper-Heidsieck while grooving vaguely to some sort of Ibiza mix in the VIP room. People like that -- they're just clubbers, though some of them will insist on showing up at dance culture events, hoping to score.

Real dance culture, in the San Francisco sense, is all about the vibe -- or,

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as 17Reasons rave organizer Shonn Mills told an enthusiastic crowd at Sunday's pro-Prop. A rally, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of fresh beats." The best events aren't mere opportunities to dance, but rituals of personal transformation -- mass auric cleansings that send participants home wobbly kneed from dancing, recharged and exhausted -- even, in some cases, without the aid of drugs. No, really!

"We're coming of age," says Mills, who sits on the San Francisco Late Night Coalition's steering committee. "We're already doing this stuff that really brings people together and raises so much energy. Taking that and moving that into the legislative area is just the natural next step."

Just ask Mark Leno: Volunteers from the Late Night Coalition helped staff his phone banks, walk his precincts and distribute his campaign literature. "This is the second time they've helped me," says the newly nominated Democratic candidate from District 13. "They also helped me in 2000 in my re- election campaign for the Board of Supervisors. They are indeed an emerging political force."

In fact, the coalition is still repaying Leno for his help in its drive to preserve South of Market nightclubs -- the issue that originally brought the group into being.

"They were very inclusive," recalls Leno, who was able to get nightclubs to provide free drinking water to potentially, er, dehydrated patrons. "They were dealing with the police, dealing with the merchants, dealing with the residential neighbors and bringing people together. They were valuing everyone's opinion, treating people with respect, and they were also able to assess how to proceed. These are very impressive people."

Very impressive people who happen to like to shake it, we might add -- and that can't be bad. Citizens of the dance nation have also been fund raising for a local soup kitchen and a Tenderloin transitional shelter, as well as volunteering at environmental cleanups with the Friends of Five Creeks.

They'll be holding their first Ocean Beach cleanup next Saturday, March 16.

"This is only the beginning," says Mills. "We're going to form a political action committee based on the same ideas that we use in our charity work. Over the next couple of weeks, we're going to be meeting with a lot of the big political people in town. The mayor wants to meet with us. We're sitting down with him next Thursday to talk about some of our issues."

Much of the old guard, it seems, has been caught off guard. But the Yes on A committee also benefited from the dance community's new activism. "It was really quite amazing to have all this young energy here," says Steve Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy, the group that organized the successful campaign for the instant runoff ballot measure. "There are systemic changes being made to the rules of the game, and it's to their credit they recognize that."

Aaron Pava, one of the founders of the Radiance rave collective, was the connection between the late-night crowd and the Yes on A committee and is working with Mills on the new PAC. "There's a new, younger San Francisco that's getting organized, that's bringing celebration and politics together," he says. "Together, we're a really loud voice, and now we have evidence that we can make a difference."

Man, I wish I hadn't spilled bleach on my purple Pumas, because now I don't know what to wear to show I'm hip to the zeitgeist. Still, I guess I'll think of something. "In the underground there's really a can-do spirit," says Mills. "You come together to put on events at the last minute, and if you see something wrong, you fix it yourself. That kind of attitude permeates our culture. It's going to be a really powerful tool for social change in San Francisco."